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lbruder

216 karma · joined August 10, 2013

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lbruder··on China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium
CTRL+F protactinium

Once again, nothing.

lbruder··on Docker Systems Status: Full Service Disruption
Well, the server was up, it was just returning HTTP 503...
lbruder··on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu
have you tried mcedit? It's the editor mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander clone) brings along, looks and feels like the old DOS editor, but has more features
lbruder··on Thank You Bootstrap 1
Hi fellow yelling old man,

would it be OK for me to steal your analogy? It's great!

In the team I'm currently leading, we have made the same observation, with stuff getting more complicated without anything substantial to show for it. In a way we're having a harder time getting out features than twenty years ago, but somehow that's "progress".

As an experiment, I had one of my juniors rewrite a (admittedly small) frontend with Go templates and HTMX, and not only did they have a blast doing it, they were surprised at how simple everything suddenly was. Give that one a try, it's worth it!

That said, there are frontends with requirements that actually do need all that framework crap. Once you want 3D stuff that a user can move around with the mouse, you pretty much have no other choice. While those special cases are rare, people prefer to learn one framework and use it for every nail they see lying around instead of looking at all the other tools in their shed...

lbruder··on Arm says it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed
What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
lbruder··on 4B If Statements
the idea sounds great, but there would have to be something in place to prevent it from degrading into a Wikipedia-style turf war, with people trying to protect "their" code against changes...
lbruder··on Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust
we're storing 120M records a day in influx 1.8, offloading cold data to S3, all on a single m5.xlarge instance that runs other backend services on the side. Less than 400 bucks per month overall aws cost, with lots of other VMs in there. We could use RDS too, but why change it to something more expensive if it already works...
lbruder··on Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow
If this is "just" sending keystrokes to notepad.exe, as in "ctrl-a, del, lots of keystrokes until one frame is done", then I'm actually more impressed by the speed keystrokes and redrawing are handled in the good ol' Win32 EDIT field.
lbruder··on Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
Worse is better. C and Unix were faster to implement new stuff as they were only 'good enough'. Lisp machines wanted to do everything 'right', right from the start, and were slower to implement new features. Unix was already winning by then...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

lbruder··on Forth BBS 2 (1985)
Seconding "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth".

After that, Jonesforth (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-reposit...) is an excellent example of Literal Programming that starts with an Assembly listing and bootstraps into a complete usable Forth system. No better way to learn Forth than to actually implement one...

lbruder··on Leaving MySQL
Another big open source DB I'd like to hear about more often is Firebird (https://firebirdsql.org/) which was forked from the Interbase code released by Borland (don't remember how they were called at the time). Four choices of connection model (process-by-connection, thread-by-connection, some weird mix, and in-process), full ANSI SQL, runs on all major platforms, and uses single file databases. Seems to be the best of SQLite (inmem, single file), MySQL (lots of connections fast) and Postgres (standard, robust) to me, in a single package. But for whatever reason it seems to be completely off the radar on HN...
lbruder··on Facebook-owned sites were down
Looks like they misconfigured a web interface that they can't reach anymore now that they're off the net.

"anyone have a Cisco console cable lying around?"

lbruder··on Heroku's Managed DB's have been down for 2+ hours
Simple dynos can be replicated with Dokku and Ledokku as a GUI. Just get an Ubuntu VM on Digitalocean, Vultr or whatever, install and configure UFW, fail2ban and automatic security updates, install dokku and you're set.

For managed databases with replication however, Dokku still leaves much to be desired...

lbruder··on Revisiting Java in 2021 – Part II
That's basically how C# came into being in the first place. Microsoft "bought" Anders Hejlsberg of Borland Delphi fame, and had him create a "better Java". And IMHO Visual J++ was a much superior Java, with a visual designer that was much more advanced than anything else available back then. The problem? It was very much Windows Only (tm) if you wanted to use the advanced features. Sun was not happy about this. And the end result of the legal struggle was that Microsoft used Visual J++ as a base for C# and scrapped Java compatibility.
lbruder··on Microsoft Office 2010: Can’t be activated anymore?
It is. Software doesn't rust. My old copy of Office 2000 still works perfectly fine -- with Wine. Windows 2000 and Office 2000 were the last versions I bought. When M$ switched to activation-based "copy protection", I moved on to Linux and never looked back.

But the thing is: You pay for something, and it works. Then, just 11 years after the sale, the product suddenly stops working, just because someone said so, even though it's still in perfect condition. That's a nope from me. Imagine you buy new shoes, and after a while you suddenly can't put them on anymore. Or an oven doesn't work anymore after just 11 years. With M$ stuff it seems to have become a new "normal"...

lbruder··on Open Insulin Foundation
As a concrete example, German programmer here. 16% of my income go to taxes, another 12% go to mandatory insurances (excluding healthcare), and about 6% go to health insurance. So about a third of my income goes to mandatory stuff and taxes, but when my son broke his arm in the schoolyard, the treatment was completely free for us. Not sure how those numbers transfer to the US, though.
lbruder··on SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases
that's one of the reasons I love Fossil so much. Way better backend than Git.
lbruder··on Why Jira Sucks
I've made the switch back to Redmine for my personal projects. By now it has full Markdown support for issues and wiki. Faster than Jira, and easier to use.
lbruder··on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
It's the PHP of business software. Powers half the market, but boy do mistakes cost you.
lbruder··on Ami, a tiny cube on wheels that French 14-year-olds can drive
Not sure about other countries, but in Germany at least an AVAS (acoustic vehicle alerting system) must be installed in new electric cars and hybrids. My Zoe sounds like a spaceship while under 30 kph, the sound becoming quieter the faster you go, as from about 20 kph the sound of the tires would be louder than an engine anyway. Could be used for mopeds too.
lbruder··on Is anybody still using Windows 95?
Have you tried soft line wrapping in GNU nano (M-S)? As long as you're running nano in an 80 column wide window, that should work fine.
lbruder··on Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages
Try Manjaro. It's based on Arch, but with a little more stable software, think Debian Testing instead of Sid. Simpler to install and works like a charm.
lbruder··on An introduction to RabbitMQ
It just works, until PUSHing the member back fails. At least use RPOPLPUSH and a separate worker queue to make sure you don't accidentally drop packets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm using Redis queues myself and trying to get rid of the last remnants of RabbitMQ in our code, but there are use cases where RabbitMQ means less thinking about stuff, because it just works(tm)...

lbruder··on Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
Go to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ and have a look at 50unattended-upgrades and 10periodic. My 10periodic looks like this:

    APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
    APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
    APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
    APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
And 50unattended-upgrades:

    Unattended-Upgrade::DevRelease "false";
    Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Kernel-Packages "true";
    Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies "false";
    Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true";
    Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot-Time "02:00";

No more worrying about updates :)
lbruder··on Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
Infrastructure architect: Five 20 minute "standups" per day, plus a seven hour meeting once a month. Add about 20 hour-long ad hoc meetings a month. Just let me do actual work dammit.
lbruder··on Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
There's an Emacs macro for that.
lbruder··on Zugzwang
Die meisten Online-Shops bieten Black-Friday-Rabatte an. Diejenigen, die das nicht tun, sind unter Zugzwang, sich ihnen anzuschließen.
lbruder··on The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
I think I still have an old copy of Office 95 at home. Gotta try that with Win10 just for shits and giggles...
lbruder··on When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts
Where Tk beats everything else. "pack" and "grid" are still way ahead of the established layout stuff. And Tcl is the perfect language for Tk. Sadly people are put off by its seemingly strange syntax and semantics...
lbruder··on Ask HN: Do you program in Basic?
Have a look at Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), an open source clone of what Delphi used to be. Active development, can compile to single executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. And the language is way more powerful than Basic.
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